Wednesday, May 24, 2000. 11:38 PMMile 7208, State College, PA
Daryl: We've been home for a full day, unpacking and showing our photos to our friends. After Seattle, we drove to the beautiful state of Montana, and camped in the western part of the state. (Idaho was the only state we drove through but didn't stop in.) Montana is beautiful, with peaks of snow still on many of the mountains.
Next, we drove to Theodore Roosevelt State Park, where bison run free among the campsites. We slept there, or tried to... I was sick for the night and threw up on my clothes, but luckily, not the tent. Feeling a little better, I drove the following day to Glenwood, Minnesota. We ate dinner with Pastors Bob and Kathleen, friends from my church back in Maryland. Then, we went to the Mall of America, which is more impressive than I expected. Suffering from a rare lapse of good sense, we spent money on Jesse Ventura souveniers.
The plan was then to drive to St Paul and camp at a local park there. If that failed, we'd stay at the nearby KOA. But the park was closed, the KOA eluded us, and the Holiday Inn Express seemed like a worse option than driving all night. So Brian took the helm, I complained about being sick, and Tim kept Brian awake. Brian ended up pulling over in the early morning hours for a nap in a truck stop in Wisconsin. I took the wheel around 6:30 a.m. and headed for Chicago. We spend about two hours in the morning walking around the city, then drove on.
At this point, the plan called for a stop at the Indiana National Seashore, but with a full day ahead of us, and Tim crying for a night of sleep in a bed, we went the rest of the way. Under a monster lightning storm, we arrived in State College around 11 Tuesday night.
What more to say? This trip was fun, we learned a lot, we stayed out of trouble and we have lots of good photos. Come visit us and we'll show them to you.